Post Brexit a UK innovation-led economy could flourish

Recent economic predictions from the Treasury are probably grossly underestimating the positive potential of Brexit, if only our government can seize the initiative. After all, economists, especially those within the Civil Service, don’t usually have extensive, if any, ‘hands on’ business experience. So how do they know where European Union (EU) legislation and regulation and our government’s gold-plating and inertia are holding back many businesses, especially small and innovative enterprises? However, loosening the bureaucratic chains is not that easy, especially when largely ignorant of their undesirable consequences, or not interested in doing anything.

Access to domestic and export markets for trading purposes are not enough in a highly competitive world. UK Limited needs to provide goods and services that customers want to buy at prices they can afford in more attractive ‘packages’ than available from elsewhere. To be able to pay high wages UK Limited needs to produce high value-added goods and services efficiently and keep on staying ahead as competitors try to catch up. So how well are we, as a nation, doing?

The United Kingdom is a middle size economy with a poor record of productivity improvement. Whilst good at creating new jobs these are overwhelmingly low wage, low productivity ones. Major problems are poor labour force skills, under-investment and a ready supply (or over-supply) of low wage labour. In effect then the UK is losing the ability to create high value-adding productive jobs: the world’s first ‘third world’ country in a cold climate.

The government could kick-start a change with Brexit. Controlling poorly skilled immigration would create an imperative for higher productivity and enable higher wages to be paid; it would stimulate innovation, training and investment. Tax incentives, grants and risk sharing could also help. Encouraging home-grown start-ups and high value-adding foreign investment would also lead to better paid jobs. Public sector procurement could be a facilitator of wide ranging innovation. Yet the real key to success is in creating an innovation-led economy for high value-added goods and services: develop, improve, become competitive, become world-leading, export and grow, repeat. However, this needs an understanding both of the nature of successful innovation, particularly low cost innovation, and of mandatory regulations, including their objectives and implementation, in order to facilitate the former by manipulating the latter.

There is a common misconception that because we are traditionally good at invention, we must be naturally good at innovation; doing existing things noticeably better. Not so. Many inventions and high or advanced technology products have failed commercially here for a variety of practical reasons, including: no viable market, pushing out the bounds of technology too far without sufficient development and politically driven lack of support. Eric von Hippel in his book Democratizing Innovation identifies users as an important source of innovation; they identify a need and a commercially viable innovative product (for themselves and others) which subsequently moves back along the supply chain to suppliers and producers.

Any form of legally sanctioned regulation, with few exceptions, tends to create and then maintain a mandatory status quo, which may be far from evolving ‘best practice’. It is difficult and slow, if not impossible to introduce changes, which obviously frustrates innovation. It has been reported by the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) (reported originally here and recently here) that “more than 90 percent” of the EU’s Single Market rules (and by extension the European Economic Area, EEA) come from the UN and other global bodies, such as the World Trade Organisation (WTO), OECD, the Food and Agriculture Organisation and the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE), all of which have been faithfully transcribed into EU law. The EU also tends to expand the basic requirements into mandatory bureaucratic processes, procedures, approvals, European Court of Justice rulings etc., and then our government, frequently gold-plates the rigidity, often leading to situations more favourable to larger (less innovative) businesses.

After Brexit, as a direct member of global bodies, the UK will be able to exert its influence directly to champion principles and practices in our innovation driven economy’s interests. Current EU membership prevents this. Temporary or permanent EU Vassal status, (aka the Transitional Deal on offer from the EU) would also prevent this. The potential is also there, after Brexit, to adapt measures or their implementation that don’t suit our interests, or opt out to some extent – somewhat more flexible than total EU control-freak rigidity, although exporting does impose conformity with the regulatory framework applicable in the overseas market, which may well follow EU or EEA practices.

Public sector procurement could illustrate what is possible after Brexit. The public sector (definitions vary) makes up somewhere between 40-50% of the economy and has considerable purchasing power. Procurement is governed in the main by the Public Contracts Regulations, which implement EU Procurement Directive 2014/24/EU, itself an implementation of the Agreement on Government Procurement (GPA) under the auspices of the WTO. Yet although giving ‘lip-service’ to the need to encourage small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) and innovation in the preamble to the EU directive, its implementation in this country often achieves the opposite result, as originally outlined here.

Outside the EU, it is perfectly feasible to rework and streamline the Public Contracts Regulations, to facilitate user led innovation, and support local entrepreneurial SMEs, social enterprises and start-ups, whilst maintaining the WTO GPA core. Some basic problems at present are the time-consuming complexity of the procurement process and legislation incorporating ECJ judgments, leading to awarding mainly large contracts and fear of facing a legal challenge by an unsuccessful tenderer. Also the process is poor at managing risk (for example, Carillion) or including local socio-economic factors. Collaborations between user and supplier (to facilitate innovation) are also discouraged in mainstream procurement. Such reworking of these regulations naturally needs strong governmental commitment and understanding of the way they lead to discrimination. Unfortunately it is likely that Mrs May will retain the EU directive indefinitely, although not mandatory outside EU Member States.

Economic forecasts that largely ignore the effects on the economy of innovation are obviously suspect in the real world. However, they do provide an indictment of government performance and its inability to seize the opportunities to facilitate an innovation economy. If the government understood how innovation could be facilitated by Brexit and its policies adapted to suit then the future prosperity of everyone in this country would be considerably greater.

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5 Comments

Jake Bennett
on April 2, 2018 at 3:51 pm

Enjoyed reading this article.

Wish UKIP had a spokesperson who could confidently articulate the economic argument that training, innovation and investment is the road to having a prosperous economy not easy access to immigrant labour which is so deeply entrenched in Lib/Lab/Con’s psyche.
If Japan can do it then why can’t we?

Margaret Dennis
on April 2, 2018 at 6:02 pm

The article is brilliant but education must be returned to the previous high standards we enjoyed before joining the Common Market. So start by training good teachers, a lot of the current ones would not pass the old 11+ in my opinion. Then technical and academic excellence and what have we got? A well informed workforce who will see who benefitted and why we have been led up many garden paths for 46 years.

Jake Bennett
on April 3, 2018 at 9:28 am

Margaret May I suggest that if we wish to return to the former quality of eduction we enjoyed in this country we should first of all reform the teachers training colleges. They are not fit for purpose; they are simply hotbeds of left-wing ideological indoctrination leaving its students quite clear that if they wish to have a career in teaching they will have to toe their political ideological line.

Margaret Dennis
on April 3, 2018 at 12:20 pm

I agree with regard to teachers training colleges, we must start there.

t g spokes
on April 8, 2018 at 2:17 pm

jake
I agree, with reservation about training and innovation. TRAINING without relevant education is not half as good. eg. understanding of physics makes engineering so much easier. Biology makes better nurses. INNOVATION, I have worked in R&D, Run laboratories, taken out patents and run ultra high tech businesses, and innovation is different. It’s wierd and a mixture of necessity, understanding from different angles, observation, cleverness, etc etc etc and actually wasting so much time that it becomes waste. in other words it’s weird. And definitely not governmentally controllable [ although a wealthy society, with rich idle middle classes were responsible for most of Victorian innovation] . Incremental advances are simple and the province of big businesses.

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